Exploring Arden: Is the Shakespearean MMOG a Blast or a Bore?

A massively multiplayer world built around characters from the plays of the Bard? That's what Ted Castronova, an associate professor at Indiana University Bloomington, set out to create in Arden: The World of William Shakespeare. It's the most ambitious and costly game project to ever come out of academia.

The game, which launched late last year, features scores of characters and situations from Shakespeare's plays as well as a large environment and a detailed economy. There's just one problem: It's kind of dull. "We joined the army of game developers who paid too much attention to realism and not enough to plain old fun," Castronova says. Arden was made available for download as an object lesson for other academic game developers, and to give a taste of what Castronova and his team are hoping to accomplish with their sequel Arden II: London's Burning, which they are readying for a summer rollout.

After interviewing Castronova, I decided to log in and see the game for myself.

Take a peek at the world of Arden. Edward Castronova had written papers, articles, and books about virtual worlds, famously calculating the exchange rate between real-world money and in-game currency. Now he wanted to build a game world of his own. After receiving a MacArthur Foundation grant, he assembled a team of students to help design a virtual world that looked like Elizabethan England and not the typical medieval sword-and-sorcery setting.

Why this setting? For starters, Castronova is a huge fan of the Bard. "There was also a really cynical reason," he concedes. "There was no guarantee that people would take a world of dragons and elves seriously. But no one at a university would question Shakespeare — they'll question Tolkien, but not Shakespeare."

I download the software, log into Arden, create a character, and start the game. I decide to make my character a Chaotic Neutral Jester, and I dress him in the most ridiculous outfit I can find. Dozens of players can log into Arden simultaneously, but no one else was online during my play session. The only people I interacted with were nonplayer characters, or NPCs.

Arden was made with a $250,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation. That amount of money is almost unheard of for a social science research project. "Just a $10,000 grant is a big deal; to get a quarter of a million is an earthquake," Castronova says. "But tell someone in the games industry that you want to develop a game for that amount, and they will say, 'Ha-ha-ha!'"

You begin the game in a small circumscribed area. It's a chance to get the hang of moving your character around. I spot a tiny sparkling thing that looks a little like Disney's Tinker Bell, and I move toward it.

"Hail, mortal!" The first nonplayer character you encounter in Arden is Peaseblossom, a fairy from the Shakespeare play A Midsummer Night's Dream. She functions as an intro/FAQ to this realm. When you're done talking to her, you enter the game world proper.

You begin the game in a tavern in the city of Ilminster. There are lots of nonplayer characters here to interact with, and chief among them is Sir John Falstaff, one of Shakespeare's most beloved characters who appeared in Henry IV parts 1 and 2 and The Merry Wives of Windsor. I approach him, and he launches into a tirade about the cowardice of Prince Hal.

Arden is built on top of the 2002 title Neverwinter Nights, a popular PC RPG that is noted for its robust modding tools and online multiplayer capabilities. It wasn't the first choice platform, however. "As it became clear that Arden was going to be funded, I started looking around for middleware we could build our game with, some platform that didn't charge any money up front," Castronova says. He and his team initially looked at working with Multiverse Network, an interesting company that lets anyone use its development software in exchange for a share of revenue generated by the resulting game. But Multiverse was itself still in beta, and Castronova's team decided against using it. "The pace of development wasn't what was needed," he says.

Falstaff keeps talking...and talking and talking and talking. I want to remind him about a line from Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2: "Brevity is the soul of wit." Finally, this larger-than-life figure sends me on a fetch quest. He asks me to find out if Mistress Quickly has repaired his torn breeches yet. I'm too polite to tell him that he should go fetch his own damn drawers...also, it's not one of the response options I'm given in the conversation tree. I trot off to retrieve plump Jack's laundry for him.

Mistress Quickly gives me a powerful sword that I can use to vanquish dragons. Actually, that's just wishful thinking on my part. She really tells me that she can't help me until I go find Iago's wife, get sewing instructions from her, and bring them back. I'm starting to see a pattern here...and I don't like it. But as King Lear said, "Nothing can come of nothing." I decide to comply with her request.

On my way out to perform a task for Mistress Quickly, I encounter Peter the Servingman from Romeo and Juliet, and he tries to interest me in yet another tedious mission. He wants me to go around visiting characters from A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Love's Labours Lost, Twelfth Night, and Winter's Tale. Gadzooks, what do these NPCs take me for? Luckily, I'm given the option of declining the mission. I tell Peter the Servingman to go swive himself.

I think I'm beginning to see why Castronova and his team wrote off Arden and decided to work up a new version. "We had people play it, and we got these overwhelmingly negative statistics," he says. "They'd log in, run around a little while, and log out. There was a lot of text, a lot of reading, but not enough fighting."

I step out into the city of Ilminster, which looks quite pretty and true to the time period. Hats off to the designers. I can tell a lot of care and love went into re-creating an Elizabethan city. "I have gone through a dramatic self-reformation in terms of how I view the industry," Castronova says. "I used to think that these guys don't know what they're doing, they need a social scientist like me. I am chastened. My respect for what Blizzard has done with World of Warcraft — it's beautiful! All the time! How did they pull it off?!"

After searching the streets for a bit, I manage to find Emilia from the play Othello. She mutters something about a handkerchief, then gives me the sewing instructions I need. She also introduces me to the game's crafting system. Arden is designed to have an in-depth economy, with players gathering resources and using them to make things and sell them to each other and to nonplayer characters.

Castronova is very interested in the economies of virtual worlds, and observing players' economic choices is one of the main reasons he wanted to design Arden. "In social science, it's pretty hard to do controlled experiments at the level you want to do," he says. "You can study bees, but what you want to study is beehives. I was thinking, wouldn't it be cool if I was actually running these games and I could change the economics and politics? I'm trying to build Petri dishes to study behavior."

On my way back to see Mistress Quickly, I visit Peter Quince, the carpenter from A Midsummer Night's Dream. He launches into a disquisition on the intricacies of the job system in Arden. Angels and ministers of grace defend us! What he's talking about is incredibly deep and complex, and I can't begin to wrap my head around it. I already have several fetch quests at this point, and I can barely keep track of them as it is. I bid the rude mechanical farewell before he's given me a tenth of his spiel and head back out into the street...but I'm lost. All the buildings in Ilminster look identical to me. I can't find my way back to the tavern.

That's it. I give up on completing missions and forwarding the storyline. I'm heading out into the countryside. Maybe there'll be some opportunity for mayhem and excitement out there. The world's mine oyster!

There's a cottage in the distance, and as I approach it I see a Brigand attacking a Wench. (Not my terminology--the game's terminology.) I'm so lacking in skills, weapons, and experience that I can't come to her aid. Luckily, a cow that's been grazing nearby bites the Brigand on the ass. That's passing strange... Between the two of them, the Wench and the cow manage to subdue the Brigand.

Action! Drama! Violent cows! Now this is more like it. (Apologies to the reader, I was so overwhelmed by this sudden burst of action that I forgot to take a screenshot.)

Out in the countryside, you can forage for plants and do battle with small animals. The landscape is also dotted with outposts where you will find Auctioneers buying and selling goods. They allow me to set the price at which I'm willing to sell my scavengings. The player's interactions with these auctioneers provide Castronova with valuable data. He says that the goal is to get "100 people to play through for six to eight hours and engage with the various systems. That'll be a sufficient sample population for an interesting experiment."

This is so humiliating. A feral pig has spotted me. If I'd taken the time to get a weapon or gain some experience, I could dispatch him with ease. But I didn't, and I'm extremely vulnerable. I flee, and the little porker gives chase. My kingdom for a horse!

It's an experience familiar to most players of massively multiplayer games — you encounter an enemy that you can't possibly beat and hotfoot it back to the safety of the nearest city. Fleeing a feral pig is completely absurd — and undignified to boot. But it's hard for players not to get wrapped up in the life-or-death nature of the threat. And it's easy to see why this sort of thing is a staple in most massively multiplayer games. Quite simply, it's fun.

Castronova has learned a valuable lesson from making Arden: The gameplay's the thing. He intends to apply that lesson in Arden II: London's Burning, the amped-up sequel that appears this summer. "Arden II is going to be more of a hack-and-slash D&D game," he says. "London's literally on fire when you start, there's a riot, and the first thing you do is kill lots of rats. This is going to be a game about hitting rats, chasing down cockatrices. Some would say, What a waste of time. But I have no problem with it. I like ordinary gameplay. Human nature likes to hit rats more than it likes to read text. Why do we want to fight against what humans want to do? It's like, you make this expensive meal involving octopus tentacles, and only three gourmands from France want to eat it. The Big Mac is a reductionist approach to cuisine, but not all of us have the luxury of dining in five-star restaurants."

To sleep, perchance to dream. The feral pig has murthered me. My experience in Arden is over, and I don't think I'll be logging in again, even though I've just scratched the surface of what I can see and do there. But I'm glad I had the chance to play. The experience was sort of like watching one of Shakespeare's flawed and overlooked plays, like Troilus and Cressida: The experience is sometimes frustrating and confusing, but it's never less than interesting.

The developers of Arden are now hard at work testing and polishing the new and improved game Arden II. "I did make a promise that it would take a year, and it's taking more than a year," Castronova admits. But it's to Castronova's enormous credit that he's been so forthcoming about the setbacks he and his team have had, and the lessons they've learned. And he's proud of what they've already accomplished with this admittedly imperfect first rev of Arden. "We proved beyond a reasonable doubt that you can take literature like Shakespeare and implement it in an interactive way," he says. "You can experience an entire play like Richard III in any order you want. Just as important, it's set an example for the rest of academia. The existence of Arden I makes it possible for anybody to build a game with any theme they want without the giggle factor. We're opening the doors, though the door is not open enough for us to consider ourselves serious game developers."

He lavishes praise on his team of student developers in Bloomington and admits that they've found these setbacks demoralizing. "A lot of people around here are really hanging their heads," he says. "But I'll take that morale hit now, and we'll surprise everybody with the new version."

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